1. Field of the Invention
This invention provides an encryption system for electronic mail messages using symmetric and asymmetric key encryption. Specifically, this invention relates to the simplification of electronic mail encryption systems by users who have an encryption system installed as well as for those who do not have an encryption system installed.
2. Related Art
In recent years, electronic communication methods (email and text messaging systems, etc.) have enhanced users' communication while the volume of emails, video/audio and text based communications have rapidly expanded. As this expansion has occurred, there is a growing amount of information that is sent on unsecure networks. These unsecured data transmissions put at risk sensitive personal and/or commercial confidential information. As communication methodologies have expanded in both the number of users and the volume of messages transmitted, a need exists for a user friendly secure form of communication. One that preferably uses existing formats and easily allows users to send and receive encrypted data messages.
Despite advancements in cryptographic tools, many available communication security solutions exist today yet very few are widely deployed and actively used except when dealing with national security level secrets. The main obstacle preventing wide spread acceptance is problems relating to the establishment and exchange of encryption keys. Previous systems typically required senders to acquire public keys of the recipients in advance of the data transmission while other prior art solutions agree upon a symmetric shared key offline. An alternative prior art solution involves having both the sender and the receiver subscribing to a third party encrypted email solution provider. However, all these solutions required a substantial industrial coloration among email service providers, standards for key distribution systems, or substantial work from users to be able to send/receive encrypted emails. Thus a need exists for a user friendly scheme for senders to encrypt data transmissions and for recipients to easily decrypt the sent encrypted messages.